This document discusses infrastructure disruptions in urban areas and their social and political impacts. It begins by noting the increasing urbanization of the global population and dependence on infrastructure networks. Infrastructure disruptions can reveal the politics underlying urban systems by frontstaging the normally invisible backstage areas. Disruptions may be caused by technical failures, natural disasters, or political mobilization targeting infrastructure. They can have cascading effects and reveal interdependencies. The document examines examples like blackouts, water shortages, and digital disruptions. It argues that infrastructure disruptions should not be seen as isolated technical issues but as revealing of social, political, and economic contexts, and can be used as forms of protest or warfare.

1. Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructures Fail Stephen Graham Newcastle University

3. Starting Points: Infrastructure and Urbanization 2007 50% of world’s population live in urban area. These 3.3 billion people concentrated on 2.4% of earth’s surface Rely on spectrum of mobilities and connections, obvious and hidden Once infrastructure networks are successfully built, "unconnected localities" can be linked through what Latour calls "provisionally commensurable connections" (Latour, 1997; 2). Urbanites "are particularly at risk when their complex and sophisticated infrastructure systems are destroyed and rendered inoperable, or when they become isolated from external contacts" (Barakat, 1998) Usually no alternatives; increasingly tightly-coupled and multi-scale interdependencies: cascade effects

4. 1. Starting Points 2. Understanding Infrastructure Disruptions 3. Infrastructure Disruptions, Social and Political Mobilisation & Political Violence 4. Conclusions

5. Cyborg Urbanization Blending of social into technical (and vice versa) ; technological into natural/organic ; and social into natural/organic Complexes of ‘infrastructure’ involve all three processes of blurring: socio-technical (cyborg bodies); socio-natural (urban water systems; resource commodity chains); techno-natural (urban metabolism & ecology) "The city", writes Erik Swyngedouw, "cannot survive without capturing, transforming and transporting nature's water. The 'metabolism of the city' depends of the incessant flow of water through its veins" (1995, 390).

6. Constituting the ‘Anthropocene’: Technosocial & Technonatural Assemblages and Metabolisms

7. “The modern home, for example, has become a complex exoskeleton for the human body with its provision of water, warmth, light and other essential needs. The home can be conceived as ‘prosthesis and prophylactic’ in which modernist distinctions between nature and culture, and between the organic and the inorganic, become blurred” Matthew Gandy 2004

8. Bill Joy: When Turning Off Becomes Suicide Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, caused a furore amongst, suggested that the mediation of human societies by astonishingly complex computerised infrastructure systems will soon reach the stage when "people won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide" (2000, 239).

9. How are certain technosocial complexes ‘black boxed’ as the ‘engineer’s stuff’ of ‘infrastructure’? For Susan Leigh-Star (1999) nine characteristics. embedded (i.e. “sunk into other structures); transparent (“it does not need to be reinvented each time or assembled for each task”); offers temporal or spatial reach or scope; is learned by its users; is linked to conventions of practice (e.g. routines of electricity use); embodies standards; is built on an installed base of sunk capital; is fixed in modular increments, not built all at once or globally;

10. Paradoxically, often only noticed when they fail Finally, infrastructure “tends to become visible upon breakdown” When infrastructure networks "work best, they are noticed least of all" (David Perry, 1995). In richer cities at least, modernist urbanism associated with progressive veiling of infrastructure, physically and discursively, beneath the urban scene, as part of emergence of “Wired-Piped-Tracked” Metropolis Kaika and Swyngedouw (2000) "the networks became buried underground, invisible, banalised, and relegated to an apparently marginal, subterranean urban world".

11. Disruptions and Collapses Work to ‘Frontstage’ the Urban ‘Backstage’ Irving Goffman’s (1959) terms, the built environment’s “backstage’ becomes momentarily “frontstaged” The sudden absence of infrastructural flow creates visibility just as the continued, normalised use of infrastructures creates a deep taken-for-grantedness and invisibility.

12. ‘Unblackboxing’ Technosocial ‘blackboxes” are momentarily undone Cultures of normalised and taken-for-granted infrastructure use sustain widespread assumptions that urban ‘infrastructure’ is somehow a material and utterly fixed assemblage of hard technologies embedded stably in place which is characterised by perfect order, completeness, immanence and internal homogeneity rather than leaky, partial and heterogeneous entities.

13. Of course for a billion urbanites or more, infrastructural failure, exclusion and precarity is perpetually and profoundly visible & imprivisation is constantInfrastructures have “always been foregrounded in the lives of more precarious social groups — i.e. those with reduced access or without access or who have been disconnected, as a result either of socio-spatial differentiation strategies or infrastructure crises or collapse.”Colin McFarlane and Jonathan Rutherford (2008)

15. Cultures and economies of infrastructural repair and improvisation almost invisible within urban studies

16. 2. Understanding Infrastructure Disruptions “Cyborgs, like us, are endlessly fascinated by machinic breakdowns, which would cause disruptions in, or denials of access to, their megatechnical sources of being.” Tim Luke (2004)(above NYC blackout, 2003)

17. Socio-technical ‘Normal Accidents’ (Charles Perrow): Blackout“We are all hostages to electricity” Leslie (1999)

18. Cascading disruptions in space and time (Richard Little) (e.g. California Blackouts, 2001)

19. The Electromateriality of ‘cyberspace’ “When servers are down, panic sets in. Electronic power failures, internal surges, the glitches that corrupt and destroy memory, mirror our relation with power itself” (Grossman, 2003) A single Google server farm consumes as much electrical power as a city the size of Honolulu.

20. Blackouts and Neoliberal Dogma Electricity deregulation in the USA had actually ignored the economic and geographical fundamentals of an industry that necessitates reliable, material connectivities between generation and use; that is prone to cascading and spiralling failure as transcontinental and transnational markets in supply are established within “complex interactive networks,” with dramatic unintended consequences ; and where the hard infrastructures are ageing and organised with a baroque level of complexity and local fragmentation.

21. But post-mortems for such events become messy! “A distributive notion of agency does interfere with the project of blaming. But it does not thereby abandon the project of identifying [ ] the sources of harmful effects. To the contrary, such a notion broadens the range of places to look for sources. ” Must look at the “selfish intentions and energy policy that provides lucrative opportunities for energy trading while generating a tragedy of the commons”; at “the stubborn directionality of a high-consumption social infrastructure”; and at “the unstable power of electron flows, wildfires, ex-urban housing pressures, and the assemblages they form” Jane Bennett Jane Bennett, (2005) “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” Public Culture 17(3): 445–65. Pp. 463.

22. Blackouts and the ‘Global’ City “We are talking about Mumbai as the next Shanghai”, a general manager for a major Mumbai advertising firm, faced with losing 30% of its revenues due to daily 4 hour power cuts, reported in 2005. “And here we are faced with the possibilities of blackouts” (SAND, 2005).

23. Also unerringly reveal the often concealed politics of cyborganised cities e.g. Katrina in 2005 not a ‘natural disaster’ or ‘Act of God.’ Rather, the inevitable result of: Climate change accentuating hurricane Hitting a city denuded of natural protection and Very poorly covered by a levee network that was systematically racially biased over centuries of constructed socio-nature in context of a A Neoconservative and racist Federal Government that had systematically skewed Emergency Planning towards terrorism for political ends

24. Fleeting Moments of Visibility: eg Trawler Severing Oceanic Optic Fibre Off Egypt, December 2008

25. Disruption, Digitality & Internet Geopolitics “On July 19, 2001, a train shipping hydrochloric acid, computer paper, wood-pulp bales and other items from North Carolina to New Jersey derails in a tunnel under downtown Baltimore. Later estimated to have reached 1,500 degrees, the ensuing fire is hot enough to make the boxcars glow. A toxic cloud forces the evacuation of several city blocks. By its second day, the blaze melts a pipe containing fiber-optic lines laid along the railroad right-of-way, disrupting telecommunications traffic on a critical New York-Miami axis. Cell phones in suburban Maryland fail. The New York–based Hearst Corporation loses its email and the ability to update its web pages. Worldcom, PSINet, and Abovenet report problems. Slowdowns are seen as far away as Atlanta, Seattle, and Los Angeles, and the American embassy in Lusaka, Zambia loses all contact with Washington.” Kazys Varnelis

26. Malign Mobilities: SARS (Roger Keil and S. Harris Ali)

27. Securitising Networked Flows

29. Malign Immobilities: Sewer Fat (Simon Marvin and Will Medd)

30. Supply Disruptions: Oil Shock

31. Disruption Geopolitics

32. Alan Feldman: ‘Normality’ and ‘Event’ -- Infrastructure and ‘securocratic war’ “The interruption of the moral economy of safe circulation is characterized as a dystopic ‘risk event’,” Feldman suggests. “Disruption of the imputed smooth functioning of the circulation apparatus in which nothing is meant to happen. ‘Normalcy’ is the non-event, which in effect means the proper distribution of functions, the occupation of proper differential positions, and social profiles.”

33. Critical Infrastructure protection, ‘resilience’ and virtual borders* Centre on pre-emtively idnetifying and targeting malign circulations – of bodies, data, pathogens, code and finance -- whilst sustaining ‘normal’ and risk-free ones “The virtual border, whether it faces outward or inward to foreignness, is no longer a barrier structure but a shifting net, a flexible spatial pathogenesis that shifts round the globe and can move from the exteriority of the transnational frontier into the core of the securocratic state.” Allen Feldman

34. “The next Pearl Harbor will be both everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It's targets will not be the U.S. military or defense system but, instead, the U.S. public and its post-industrial and highly informatized lifestyle. What is now a tool for comfort, an object of leisure, or a necessary support for work [..] will soon become the world's deadliest weapon” (Debrix, 2001)

35. Postal Systems…

36. Water…

37. Streets…

38. 3. Infrastructure Disruptions, Social and Political Mobilisation & Political Violence Contemporary political mobilisation and political violence increasingly deployed through embedded urban infrastructures at multiple scales to distribute cascade symbolic and logistical effects “Complex infrastructure often exhibits extreme levels of vulnerability to non-planned events. The reason for this is may be found in an area of complexity research called highly optimized tolerance (HOT). HOT research has found that complex networks, like most global infrastructure, exhibit behaviors explained by the design considerations of its makers. The end-result of this planning is a network that is extremely robust against certain types of anticipated failures/insults but conversely is hypersensitive to unanticipated classes of uncertainty”. John Robb

41. “Grocer Terrorists”: Criminalisation of (Alleged) Infrastructural Targeting: “The Coming Insurgency”and the “Tarnac Nine”

42. Mumbai’s ‘Water Wars’ (Colin McFarlane)

44. Infrastructure Disruptions and Political Protest - Bangkok: People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD), Dec 2008

45. Gate Gourmet Dispute, Heathrow, 2005

46. Criminalising Strikes, Securitising Labour and the Postpolitical ‘Logistics City’ (Deb Cowen)

47. Passage-Point Urbanism: Jittery Camps, Archipelagoes of Enclaves & Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism “The new bunker is a passage from one point to another” Virilio and Lotringer

48. Disruption by Design and the Liberal Way of War: State Infrastructural Warfare "There is nothing in the world today that cannot become a weapon" (Liang and Xiangsui, 1999) "If you want to destroy someone nowadays, you go after their infrastructure. " (Phil Agre, 2001)

49. “Strategic Paralysis”: Urban Infrastructure and US Air Power John Warden’s “Enemy as a System”. Basis for US doctrine : “Strategic Ring Theory”. Civilian infrastructures =‘dual-use targets’ Ritzer "by declaring dual-use targets legitimate military objectives, the Air Force can directly target civilian morale” "If infrastructure links the subsystems of a society," he wrote, "might it be the most important target ?" (Felker, 1998).

51. “It should be lights out in Belgrade : every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted. We will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950 ? We can do 1950. You want 1389 ? We can do that, too!” Thomas Friedman, New York Times, April 23rd, 1999

52. ‘Bomb Now, Die Later’ : The ‘War on Public Health’ in Iraq -- 1991-2003 ”I want to put every [Iraqi] household in an autonomous mode and make them feel they were isolated… We wanted to play with their psyche” General Buster Glosson 1991 .

53. Towards State Computer Network Attack (CNA)

54. The aim of the US cyber-attack programme is to “gain access to, and control over, any and all networked computers, anywhere on Earth.” William J. Astore, Tom Dispatch, June 5th, 2008, at

55. Conclusion: Heuristic Devices Critical focus on the politics of infrastructure disruptions a powerful perspective for linking ‘mobilities turn’, political ecology and economy, critical urban geography, biopower and critical security & risk studies/IR Further disrupt notions of ‘natural disaster’, ‘technical’ failure etc. Infrastructure disruptions and their manufacture often remain hidden, their politics obfuscated, beneath continued modernist binaries: cities and nature; cities and ‘the environment’, ‘North-South’, ‘peace/war’, ‘inside’/’outside’ of nations etc. Reveal the traces and politics of cyborg urbanisation (and decyborganization) Exposure of disruptions of ‘normal’ circulations and mobilities serve to problematise and denaturalise ‘normal’ ones within broader context of neoliberal globalisation, urbanisation and securitisation